


It's my own remorse

by Aegir



Series: Heroes aren't meant to survive [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Women talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-11 01:40:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7870555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Age of Ultron Natasha regroups, wrestles with her choices, and tries talking to person who frightens her most - Wanda Maximoff</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's my own remorse

**Author's Note:**

> Because I regret not being able to get more Natasha into my ongoing story 'So much harder to love when alive' I wrote this prequel for her. Also I really think Natasha and Wanda should talk!
> 
> I didn't tag this Bruce/Nat because there's no Bruce, but the story will include Nat thinking about their failed relationship and what went wrong. I didn't tag Clint/Laura either, but it's in the background.
> 
> Finally there is some revisiting of Nat's AoU flashback, but not graphic

When the debriefings are done Natasha lets Clint drive her to his home, and Laura talk her into staying a week.  She feels wrong about that, ends up leaving after only six days because the envy is starting to choke her again.

She hates being so ungrateful.  Being a visitor to normality is more than she was made to have.  That break she’d taken after Project Insight had been a really bad mistake, the one thing Black Widow can’t afford is time to think.

After six days she’s back at Stark Tower, which everyone except Tony is still resisting calling Avengers Tower.   Maria Hill briefs her.  There’s no news on Bruce.  Thor has gone back to England.  Wanda Maximoff is installed on a floor of Stark Tower, and Tony has got himself holed up in his lab most of the time, trying to develop something that would protect against whatever it is that allows Wanda into their minds.  Natasha pictures Tony building himself a new helmet out of a protective metal, the picture isn’t funny because she wants it to be possible too badly.  It’s unabashedly ugly, but she wishes it had been Wanda Maximoff who'd died in the battle rather than her brother. She’d rather live knowing Pietro could put a knife in her back without her even glimpsing it than live knowing Wanda can get into her head.

Vision’s around, Hill tells her.  Natasha decides to leave Vision to Stark. 

Steve comes to her room soon after, looking as washed out as she feels. 

“I haven’t been much of a friend lately,” he says.

“Me neither.”  Of course it figures that Steve, whose world had fallen apart twice in two years, would be blaming himself for not supporting her.  When you’re drowning you can’t hold up someone else.  “You were dealing with way too much on your own, Steve,” she says. “Do yourself a good turn and call Sam.”

~~~

After a day Natasha does a bit of research, then asks FRIDAY about Tower supplies.  Asking FRIDAY isn’t easy yet, it’s probably ridiculous to miss JARVIS like a person, but she does.  Must be much worse for Tony, but she’s having too hard a time keeping her own head above water to try and hold him up.  He has Pepper Potts and Colonel Rhodes at least.  It’s no surprise that Pepper has laid in some Sokovian specialties.  Natasha makes sweet-smelling tea in small glasses and takes it to Wanda’s room. 

Wanda looks awful.  Her eyes are red, with huge dark shadows under them standing out against pale skin.  Natasha probably ought to feel sympathy, but mostly what she feels is fear, and the thought Wanda might be able to sense her fear makes it worse. 

“Drink this,” she says, voice business like, no fake kindness.

“Why?” Wanda says. 

“Why do people usually drink?”

“Why would you care?”  There’s fight in the girl, that’s good.

“Why are you here?” Natasha counters.  “If you really wanted to die you could have killed yourself by now.  You’re still alive, you might as well drink the tea.”

Wanda does.  Natasha counts that as a victory. 

“I know Steve’s made you an offer,” she says, when the tea is finished.  “That he’s suggested you join the Avengers.”

“Barton suggested it first.”

“Figures,” Natasha says.  “I think you should do it.”

“Why?” Wanda demands.  “Why would you want me here?  I hurt you.  You’re afraid of me.”

Black Widow has a great poker face, but that’s useless here.

“I’m sorry,” Wanda says.  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to…. But I don’t know how to block it.”

Natasha wishes Wanda was wrong, but she is terrified.  How do you fight someone who can see your mind? 

Face your fear.  Always face it.

“Yes, your powers frighten me.  That’s why I would rather have you here, and on our side.  It’s also why I want to help you. “

“One hundred and sixty-eight.”  Wanda says, catching Nat off guard.

“What?”

“One hundred and sixty-eight.  The number of people who died in Durban.  I caused that.  I had my parents ripped away, and I destroyed other families.  I didn’t even think.  Why haven’t you just killed me?”

“Because you’re sorry,” Natasha snaps.  She doesn’t want to feel sympathy, still less to see herself in this lost, angry child.

“Do you have family?”

“I grew up in an institution.”

“Then you can’t imagine losing your family.”

“I don’t know it the way you do.  But….”  They need this child on their side, they need it because it’s that or kill her, and Natasha wants so badly to be done with murder.

“There was a person.  We grew up together.  When we – …  When we were adult.”  When they graduated.  When they’d both lived through training.  “We swore we’d always be sisters.  Family wasn’t something we were meant to want, but we did.”  They’d cut their arms and mingled blood.  Natalia still doesn’t know where Yelena got the idea. “She’s not dead.  At least she wasn’t last time I had news.  If we meet again we’ll probably be enemies.  There’s more than one way to lose people. And I put a bomb in a hospital.  You think you’re the only one with red in her ledger?”

Wanda stares.  She’s so young, for all Natasha doesn’t doubt there’s enough nightmares in her head for someone twice her age.  At last she says, “I didn’t kill myself because I don’t deserve peace.”

“OK,” Natasha says.  “That’s one reason to live.”

~~~

Clint comes in a few days later, but only to report he’s taking leave.  “Real long leave.  I want to be able to sing Nathaniel to sleep without having to shower off a killing trip first.”   He looks exhausted.  “Sometimes I think I had no business mixing raising kids with what I do.”

“You’ve never said that before.”

“Well, I was stupid when I started.  High on the idea I could clean up the world one murder at a time.  That I was the new Robin Hood.  So I’d fly out, kill someone I knew nothing about because Fury or Coulson called them a threat to security, then fly back, tuck my kids in and get a good night’s sleep.  That’s screwed up.  And I didn’t even see how screwed up, until I found I’d been working for HYDRA.  Bunch of comic book bad guys, and I was doing their murders.  What kind of model for my kids did it make me?”

“You’re an Avenger now.”

“It’s still killing, Nat.  Sure I’ll probably go back, it’s what I’m good at and at least there’s a half-decent answer to ‘What did you do at work today, Daddy?’ now.  But I need a break.  A long one.”

“OK,” Natasha says. 

Clint gives her a lopsided smile.  “Don’t be a stranger.”

~~~

“The world is blaming your friend,” Wanda says.  “For Durban.  Because I used him as a weapon.  Now he’s running.  You should hate me.”

Natasha flinches at that.  Not because it’s news, but because it hits too close to home.

“You didn’t do anything I haven’t.  That’s the problem with being made into a weapon, it shapes how you see other people.  Especially if it’s something like HYDRA that makes you.”

“We didn’t know they were HYDRA when we signed up,” Wanda says, with an encouraging flash of anger.  “By the time we did it was too late to leave.”

“Join the club.  We should get a commemorative badge for people who didn’t know they were working for HYDRA.”

“We wanted to do right, help our people.  Instead my creation destroyed our country.  My fault.  My doing.”

“Now, stop right there.  Durban was your fault.  Ultron existing was not.  Messing around in Tony Stark’s head was a wrong thing to do, but Stark wasn’t forced to build a murderbot in reaction.  And he was working on Ultron before, what you did just convinced him to take a shortcut.  Blame yourself for the things you are really to blame for.  Taking on the guilt for things you didn’t want and could not have predicted won’t help you or anyone else.”

She leaves it at that, doesn’t add ‘At least you were an enemy then.’  Because it’s not just Durban Bruce is running from.  Looking back she’s sickened by herself.  She’d pleaded for Bruce’s trust, told him she liked him because he didn’t like to fight, then betrayed it all.  Used him as a weapon as much as Wanda had, as much as the Red Room used her, and she hadn’t even seen how wrong it was, how much it gave the lie to her own claims of love to force Bruce to become something he didn’t want to be.

How had it happened? 

~~~

“I was rattled,” she says to Hill, and it’s hard saying that.  Black Widow is never supposed to be rattled.  “I’d thought was repaying.  Wiping out some of the red.  And all the time it was HYDRA I was working for.  More wrong choices.  I didn’t trust myself to make right ones any more, and then the public reaction to the file dump, my past.  I knew it would be bad.  I guess I thought my skin was a little thicker.  I was looking for an out, but then….”  She can’t properly line the dots up in her mind even now.  “I think … remembering the Red Room, I’d started thinking the way they taught me to again.  We needed the Big Guy.  It made sense at the time.”

“So, you screwed up,” Hill says, and this is what’s great about Maria, she stays matter of fact.   “You owe Banner a big damn apology, but you’re not going to just crawl into a hole, are you?  It isn’t what you do.”

“That’s why I was the best the Red Room had,” Natasha says, topping her drink up.  “I didn’t know when to quit.  Still don’t.”

~~~

Wanda is doing a little better.   Pepper has come up with some training exercises that are allowing her to control her talents better.  Having someone look at a picture on a card, and having Wanda try to block what they are seeing, or focus only on that and nothing else.  She asks if Nat would like to take part, but that’s too far for her.

“I won’t do it again,” Wanda says.  “Get into your head I mean.  That’s a promise.”

Natasha doesn’t place a high value on promises.  “Is it an apology?” she says.

“Yes.  Yes, I am truly sorry.”

“OK.  I accept that.  Don’t get any ideas about doing it again, but in a way you did me a good turn.”

“What?  How?”

“You gave me back memories I had lost.”  Memories wiped.  Right after the operation, she thinks, although there is still no recollection of the wipe itself.  But it would make no sense to leave her with the knowledge she had been sterilised against her will.  Disaffected Widows were no use at all.  So a wipe of the last few weeks, and a round of ‘re-education’, leaving them with a loyal operative.  No knowledge of what had been taken.  Until now.

Now the shock of being thrust back into that time is fading, she is very angry.  Now time has passed, with the more analytical side of her mind, she can tell the self-revulsion at knowing the Red Room’s marks would be forever carved inside her body had been illogical.  Whatever she had done for them, she had not asked for or deserved that. 

She still hates it.  She can also see how foolish it had been to believe running away with a man mired in his own self-hated would be any kind of answer. 

She is an Avenger.  There is still that.

“They were ugly memories,” she tells Wanda, “but I would rather live with the truth all the same.”

~~~

Laura calls, trying to get her to come and visit, telling her the kids are asking when Auntie Nat is coming again.

“Soon,” she tells Laura.  She’s not ready yet, but she will be.

**Author's Note:**

> As in 'So much harder to love when alive' I put the Hulk's rampage in Durban, because Marvel won't tell us what city that was supposed to be, and it can't be Johannesburg where the scenes were shot because Johannesburg is not on the coast.


End file.
